My Warrior Mother
Women’s History Month celebrates the vital role of women in America. This year the focus is on the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. My mother was born into a country where suffrage was universal, but she was also born into a nation filled with misogyny, racism, and fear of anything connected with the unknown. And boy, was she the unknown. A graduate of Harvard Design School with colleagues who ended up with work designing the skyline of cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago, she worked in a firm with men who saw this long-legged beauty and felt it appropriate to ask her to make the coffee and on several occasions made remarks and physical advances that in our current climate would be regarded as assault. Rather than complain about these incidents, she preferred to focus on the positive, her family, her friends, her limitless curiosity, her belief that all human beings deserved to be treated equally.
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Keep Moving
“A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” —Alvy Singer, Annie Hall, Woody Allen. Yes, Woody Allen has made his mistakes, but his characters often say things in his movies that stay with me forever. Or, in the case of the poorly reviewed Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), the sight of a rather fetching sheep wearing fancy lingerie and Gene Wilder drinking Woolite after that sheep leaves him. Anyway, let’s talk about the shark otherwise known as a creative project that has risk attached, a novel, a film script, a poem, an unsolicited article. This shark is going to need to keep moving or it will not survive—in fact, it may not survive anyway—or maybe you are the shark. Anyway, keep moving.
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How to Fail an Active Shooter Drill
I’m not quite old enough to remember the era when students hid under their desks in order to avoid nuclear annihilation. I came of age in school during the sixties and seventies. We had lots of fire drills where we wandered aimlessly around the parking lot and teachers grabbed the opportunity to smoke and gossip. When I started working in 2000 in a huge public high school, I was introduced to active shooter drills. Essentially, your door automatically locks, students huddle in a silent group in a corner and you wait, wait to be told the shooter was in police custody. There was a special coded announcement made over the loudspeaker which guaranteed the information was true. Of course, if the shooter killed the office staff you might want to stay in your room. The reasons for these drills were sadly evident since Columbine in 1999—since then the United States has experienced 25 more mass school shootings with the loss of life close to 300.
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